

Following the lead of Siegfried Zielinski (2006) it provides less an archaeology than an ‘anarachaeology’ of media archaeology, understanding this term in political as well as methodological terms.


This article examines the emergent field of media archaeology as offering a materialist approach to new media and specifically the Internet, constituting a ‘travelling discipline’ or ‘indiscipline’ rather than a new disciplinary paradigm. Finally, this article illustrates how this method of coded magic merging with zombie media can be applied by individuals to create unique experience, and how art practice corresponds with open source culture. It also suggests that media never dies: it decays, rots, reforms, remixes, gets historicized and reinterpreted. This method proposes a depunctualization of media and the opening, understanding and hacking of concealed or blackboxed systems. This discussion illustrates contemporary machine prototyping with the reuse, re-exploration and circuit bending of old media.
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Further, the thesis focuses on the new challenges the code sharing culture has brought to the artists: while the mysterious cover of techniques were revealed, how do the artists discard the conventional notion of 'skill pioneer' and 'technique creator', and further produce art work with unique qualities? In order to provide a possible solution to these questions, the author would like to introduce the notion of 'Zombie media', an approach of applying media archaeology into artistic methodology advocated by media archaeologist Jussi Parrika. This discussion is followed by the description of artists' advantages of working within an open source society which includes the efficient solution of technical and conceptual problems. This interlinks digital media with the pre-modern esoteric experience to provide a research context. This article firstly discusses contemporary scholars' work on the notion of 'computer code as magic incantation'. This article discusses the implications of open source culture within new media art practice from a practitioner's perspective of view. Media kills nature as they remain as living deads. A discarded piece of media technology is never just discarded but part of a wider pattern of circulation that ties obsoleteness to recycling centers, dismantling centres in Asia, markets in Nigeria, and so forth - a whole global political ecology of different sorts where one of the biggest questions is the material toxicity of our electronic media. And yet, we want to point to a further issue when it comes to abandoned media: the amount of discarded electronic media is not only the excavation ground for quirky media archaeological interests, but one of the biggest threats for ecology in terms of the various toxins they are leaking back to nature. As such, it is clearly related to the earlier calls to investigate "dead media" by Bruce Sterling and others: to map the forgotten, out-of-use, obsolete and judged dysfunctional technologies in order to understand better the nature of media cultural development. Zombie media addresses the living deads of media culture.
